


(things don't always go) According to Plan

by AngeNoir



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Era, Blackwatch Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Gen, Plans, Recruitment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 15:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15027203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: For once, a joint Overwatch and Blackwatch mission seems to go perfectly. Sure, they missed a few of the important people, but for the most part, they cleaned out the Deadlocks, recovered the weapons shipment, and passed off the suspected domestic terrorists to the FBI. Gabriel's operating on little sleep, adrenaline, and sheer willpower when he walks into the detainee unit and stares at the kid.He slams the door and starts trying to come up with a plan to keep this kid from prison.





	(things don't always go) According to Plan

**Author's Note:**

> **[ DAY 1 ]** Plan A / Plan B

_**OW-BW JOINT MISSION: LOG 29.73.21** _

 

Gabriel Reyes was operating on less than three hours of sleep in the past forty-eight hours, and it looked like he wasn’t going to be sleeping anytime soon. The plan had… it was a plan, which was the problem. Plans never survived the first encounter with the enemy; that was something he knew from long ago, during the Crisis, and it hadn’t been proved wrong yet. Still… he was cautiously optimistic. The plan hadn’t fallen totally apart, Overwatch hadn’t fucked up too badly, and his operatives, while not all coming home safe and sound - always a blow, especially with how few operatives Blackwatch had in the first place - most of his operatives were returning.

“Commander?”

Gabriel looked up from his mug of sludge - the coffee here was atrocious - and raised an eyebrow. He was at the mobile headquarters desk, which was a ridiculously fancy name for ‘back of the truck with a mobile desk balanced on the tailgate’ but, in the field, whatever worked. He had three screens up, and nearby was the loaned agents from Overwatch. He hadn’t liked doing the mission with Overwatch - still didn’t like it, though he had to admit they really smoothed the way with the local authorities. Still, Agent Singh and Agent Ahmed were professional and could take direction, even if they had some friction with the other agents on his team.

Agent Singh smiled tentatively. “We gathered up all the prisoners, have them in mobile detainee units, set up by the FBI.”

“Who’d we miss?” he asked, voice rough with his lack of sleep.

With a small wince, Agent Singh opened his mouth to answer, but his operative Dahan came around the back of the truck, saying, “Hey, Reyes, I got a list - ”

Agent Singh’s eyebrows went up, and when Dahan saw Singh, her voice cut off and she suddenly became stiff and almost wooden. “Sir,” she said, voice clipped.

Holding up a hand, he turned to Agent Singh. “The missing?”

Agent Singh and Agent Dahan eyed each other, and then Agent Singh clearly dismissed Dahan with his eyes, turning back to Gabriel. “Commander, we missed two of the ranking members, and several third-tier. We also missed Casey Johnson.”

“We missed _Casey Johnson_?” Gabriel repeated slowly, setting his mug down with deliberate slowness.

Both agents clearly fought not to flinch.

“Casey Johnson. The sister, and clear mastermind, behind Deadlock.”

“We got Elijah Johnson,” Dahan said promptly, then seemed to remember Agent Singh standing next to her and added on a belated, “Sir.”

Gabriel pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head slowly. “Right. Great. Agent Singh… coordinate with the FBI and local police to set out APBs and whatever the hell necessary to try and track down the ones that slipped through. Don’t focus on the low level fish; they won’t know where the top tiers went to lay low. I need a list of the top level members we did snag, and in order of priority - ”

Dahan waved the datapad in her hand.

Gabriel glanced between the two of them and fought not to sigh too deeply. Obviously, coordination and communication was lacking between his agents and the Overwatch agents, but for right now he wasn’t exactly operating clearly, either.

“Well, at least we got Elijah,” he sighed. “That much of the plan went right. Any contingencies we needed to use?”

“No, it was pretty straightforward,” Dahan said.

Agent Singh cleared his throat.

Dahan rolled her eyes. “ _Sir_.”

Trying not to get annoyed, Gabriel motioned for Dahan to continue.

“Locals kept out of our way, we breached as planned, got in, got out, met a few pockets of strong resistance, but for the most, we did just fine. We got two Os with injuries, three bodies and four injuries of our own. _Sir_. Report is typed up, even, just needs your approval.” Dahan handed over the datapad and then crossed her arms as Gabriel scrolled through the paperwork, skimming the bare minimum.

With another sigh, Gabriel put the datapad down next to the holoscreens he’d been fielding and glanced at the nearest one. “You got all that, Strike-Commander?”

Both agents visibly stiffened and came to attention, realizing that Jack Morrison was on channel with him.

“I did. Wrap it up there, see if you can get the locations of the ones we missed from your prisoners, pass them off to local law enforcement for jail time. Good work, Reyes.”

A soft ding let him know that Jack had closed the channel, and he turned back to the other agents. “Well? Let’s get a move on. I got the priority list here; anyone who’s not one of the names on our top tiers gets dumped into the local’s hands. Work on coordination, and we might even get done before tomorrow night if we’re lucky.”

Singh looked dismayed - though the operation was long, and Gabriel could understand why Singh would be tired and wishing for a faster op - but Dahan merely shook her head. “I’ll see if I can find any more of the pep-up.”

“Stop calling it pep-up,” Gabriel replied automatically - Medic Ryu hated that name, and her rants were legendary.

Dahan rolled her eyes and wandered off. Gabriel looked over at Agent Singh and sighed. “You’re dismissed,” he said, and Singh saluted sharply before walking at a quickmarch away.

At least everything had gone according to plan, considering all the potentials for it to go sideways. Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck, picked up his beanie, and made his way to the first person he needed to interrogate.

 

_**OW-BW JOINT MISSION: LOG 32.73.17** _

 

Running now on three hours of sleep in almost seventy-two hours, Gabriel walked into the last detainee unit set up, eyes on his intereceiver, flicking through notifications from his team members. “McCree, Jesse,” he said, closing the door behind him and looking up.

Messy brown hair and angry, feral eyes stared defiantly up at Gabriel.

Turning on his heel, Gabriel opened the door and stepped out, slamming the door behind him. The temporary unit - a hard-light projection with frosted walls to prevent people from seeing out or in, to preserve the identity of the suspects from the hovering media drones that had been buzzing around the scene for the past forty hours or so - shivered and nearly collapsed the force of Gabriel’s anger.

“Sir?” Agent Singh asked, the other lead Overwatch agent… Ahmed, that’s right, Agent Ahmed - the other agent glancing up from where they had been storing their gear.

“Get me five burgers, three fries, a soda and a milkshake and a bottle of water, immediately!” he barked, storming past them.

“Commander - ” Agent Ahmed began, his brow furrowing.

Whirling on his heel, knowing the picture he painted in his black tactical armor and his beanie, his reddened and bloodshot eyes, and the rumors Overwatch had about Gabriel Reyes, the infamous ‘tactical ops’ commander, he roared, “Is there something I wasn’t clear about, Agent Ahmed?”

Quailing, Agent Ahmed shook his head in the negative, vigorously. “N-no, sir, immediately, sir.”

Singh had an unimpressed look on his face - Singh was a bit more seasoned, and was young but not in the way Ahmed was - but they both obediently stopped what they were doing and left, presumably to follow his demands.

He stormed towards the cluster of his agents, most of which had already broken down their mobile camp and clearly ready to move on now that the interrogations were pretty much over and FBI had taken most of their prisoners away for processing. “Dahan!” he barked.

She broke away from the group, brow furrowed. “Something up, Reyes?” she asked.

“Why was this name not the _top_ of the list?” he thundered, stabbing his finger at the last name on the list to be interrogated.

Tilting her head, she mouthed the name once, twice, and then she brightened. “Oh, he was a last minute pull from the general suspects - enough people listed him as the protege of Elijah Johnson that it was too risky to let him drop free. But because his name wasn’t on any of our intel lists, he had lowest priority in terms of interrogation. Why, did he turn out to be useful?”

Lips curled in a snarl, he sliced his gaze across _all_ his operatives. “Who. The hell. Processed. This man,” he said, voice low and dangerous.

They all looked at each other - they knew his voice only dropped low when heads would roll. Finally, nervously, Kuznetsov lifted his hand. “He was last minute, like Sarah say.”

“How old is he,” Gabriel asked, voice deceptively soft.

Kuznetsov looked at his fellow operatives, licked his lips. “He, and others, say 18. Age of majority in this country, no?”

Gabriel whipped around to Dahan. “As the most senior agent on the ground,” he hissed, “would you agree with that assessment?”

She licked her lips briefly, glancing at the others, before realizing whatever she said would be a catch-22. “I… did not see the person before or after Kuznetsov took him to the detainee unit.”

“You did not assess this prisoner,” Gabriel repeated.

Closing her eyes, she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. “No, sir.”

“Expect your consequences to fall on your head _as soon_ as we get back to HQ Zurich, because we do _not_ take child prisoners,” Gabriel snarled, and then he stormed back towards the unit. “Where the _hell_ is Singh and Ahmed? How long does it take to get some goddamned food here?” he bellowed.

It took almost two more minutes of him snapping and setting a fire under the tails of everyone around him before the food appeared, and then he snatched the bags and drink carrier and reentered the detainee unit.

“Y’ got scared ‘r somethin’, _pendejo_?” the kid snarled, and Gabriel didn’t miss the way that the kid was shaking. “Can’t take th’ Deadeye of th’ Deadlocks?”

“Is that what they’re calling kids before their first voice crack?” Gabriel said, and his voice was steady, measured - his anger locked away and held down. He couldn’t make this more stressful for the kid, and this kid didn’t deserve any of his anger.

Clearly outraged, the kid jerked away as Gabriel placed all the food and drinks onto the small table. “’M notta kid! ’M eighteen years ol’!” the boy squawked.

“I’d believe that more if I was maybe a blind dog,” Gabriel drawled, and snake-like, he snapped his hand out and gripped the boy’s wrists.

The kid froze, and that was terror in the kid’s eyes, breath going short and shallow, muscles locked. Gabriel felt like ten kinds of asshole, but he lifted the kid’s wrists. “Don’t move,” he said mildly, trying to keep his voice reassuring - but reassuring had always been Jack’s schtick, not Gabriel’s, and he didn’t know how to be reassuring. Twisting the kid’s arms a little to reveal the hardlight lock on the handcuffs, he keyed in his credentials. Then he let go, and as the kid yanked his hands back, the handcuffs melted away.

“What th’ hell?” the kid asked, staring at the handcuffs and then back at Gabriel. “Y’ some kynna _brujo_ ‘r somethin?”

“Or something,” Gabriel said, putting the datapad on the desk and sitting down in the chair opposite the kid, tapping fingers lightly against the screen. He was trying hard to find some record of this kid - birth, even death, something that would give him the leverage to get this kid out and back on the streets, or at least back to parents. Guardians. _Someone_. “You got any family, kid?”

“Ain’ a kid,” the kid said, folding his arms with a pout.

The kid was scared, angry, and unwilling to be cooperative. He’d been sitting in this room for almost twenty hours now, most likely with only water provided, and yet he wasn’t making a single move towards the food put in front of him - and, underneath the dirty and ragged tee on his upper body, his arms were like toothpicks. Gabriel had seen plenty malnourished kids in his time, and he knew what he was seeing in front of him.

Quick scans showed that the kid - McCree, if that was his real name - was most likely on his own, or at least had been on his own for years. Enough evidence from the scant interrogations that mentioned McCree implied the kid had been with the gang for at least three years, if not more. At least, from what Gabriel could gather while the uncomfortable silence built up.

It was interesting that the kid wasn’t trying to fill the silence, though. Gabriel had been at tables like this, across from criminals much older and more hardened than the kid, and silence normally had them fidgeting, starting to mouth off. Silence was an effective prompter for many.

“You aren’t gonna eat?” Gabriel asked, lifting an eyebrow at the food.

The kid flicked his glance in what he probably thought was a dismissive manner, but Gabriel watched as the kid carefully took in the veritable feast in front of him. Studiously casual, the kid lifted one shoulder. “Pro’lly poisoned ‘r some shit,” he said.

It took everything in Gabriel’s power to keep from snorting or laughing. Instead, he pulled the fries out of their greasy bag, flattened the bag messily with one hand, and then upended the fries onto the makeshift platter. Taking a generous handful of fries, he began eating them, one by one, leaning back in his seat. “Suit yourself. You’ve got yourself into a pretty pickle here, you know. More than seventy percent of the people we took into custody fingered you as, say, the protege of old Elijah. Puts you in a bad position, because Elijah’s done some pretty shitty stuff, wouldn’t you say?”

The kid’s eyes were darting towards the fries in Gabriel’s hand and the wall, as if he couldn’t keep himself from looking at the food. “Dunno what y’r talkin’ ‘bout.”

“Loyalty’s all well and good,” Gabriel said, voice gentle. “Doesn’t matter a whit, because as much as this was an Overwatch mission, the people who get you are the FBI. And the FBI are probably just gonna drop you in the nearest max prison, especially since you keep claiming you’re not a kid - ”

“’M eigh _teen_ \- ”

“ - but it doesn’t matter in any case, because Casey is still out there. You’ve been in this room the longest. I don’t know about you, but Casey Johnson never struck me as the trusting type. I don’t think she’d spring to pull you outta jail, and if you _did_ get outta jail, I don’t know whether she’d ignore you or hunt you down. Way I see it, you gotta couple of hard decisions to make, which isn’t very fair, but there’s not much I can do for you.”

The kid scowled at the table, arms folded defensively, almost hunched over. “Case ain’t gonna kill me.”

From what Gabriel understood, of the Johnson siblings, Casey was much more ruthless and cold-blooded than her brother. She was also cruel and capricious, and people that pissed her off for petty reasons often ended up staked out in the desert - Blackwatch had found more than one of her ‘punishments’ in the hills of New Mexico’s desert landscape. Still, this kid would need to make the decision himself to give up on Casey protecting him, or to roll the dice and hope that Casey didn’t think that he squealed here to Gabriel.

“Be that as it may, it doesn’t really matter, because you’re heading off for Otero if not Cibola,” Gabriel replied, shrugging.

“Sounds like yer jus’ ‘ere with a lotta bad news,” the kid mumbled.

Silently, Gabriel considered the kid, long and hard. He couldn’t find anything concrete about a Jesse McCree, but preliminary research gave him a Jesse Begaye who, if records were correct, should only be 16, and barely 16 at that. There wasn’t enough info for Gabriel to place if the two were the same people, but tiny pictures from an elementary school dance, fuzzy and weak, suggested at least a modicum of similarity.

If he left this kid here, if he followed the plan and interrogated this kid, turned him over to the Feds, he wouldn’t have a headache. He wouldn’t get in trouble. He would be following the plan that had been working so far.

Then again, in the Crisis, plans never really survived anyway.

“Alright, kid.”

“Notta - ”

“Kid, yes, I know,” Gabriel said, voice rough and impatient as he tried to wrack his brain for some level of justification for what he was about to do. “You can dance like you’re doing, ignore my questions, I can get harder and rougher with my interrogation, we can do the whole nine yards, no problem.”

He stopped, pinched the bridge of his nose.

“... Or?” the kid asked, voice suspicious.

Kid was smart, was high enough up that high-level Deadlock members knew of him, and whether or not there was truth to the rumors - there _were_ rumors about Deadlock’s ‘Deadeye’ operative. In fact, if Gabriel remembered correctly, four of the non-fatal casualties they got were from this Deadeye operative. “Or,” he said heavily, “you come back with us, and we see if you wash out of our program.”

Those suspicious brown eyes fixed on Gabriel’s face, sharp intelligence assessing him. “Didn’ think Ov’rwatch took on shit like me.”

“First of all,” Gabriel said severely, “this is a time-sensitive offer. It won’t be on the table forever. Second of all, they don’t. I, however, am not Overwatch.”

The kid’s floppy hair fell in his eyes and he looked at the fries again before looking up at Gabriel. “Ah know yer Gabriel Reyes, from the Crisis. Yer Ov’rwatch.”

“Believe what the hell you want, kid,” Gabriel sighed, standing up and tapping on the datapad, trying to draft some level of paperwork that would make it legal for him to abscond with a 16 years old kid from America. Quietly, he exited the room, closing the door behind him.

Dahan stood there, arms folded. “I know that look, Reyes. What’re you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that if he stays here, they’re gonna try him as an adult, even if he’s not. I’m thinking that Blackwatch could always use an operative like Deadlock’s Deadeye, if he really is that. If he’s not, he can still try the program, and if he washes out, we can kick him over to the army and that’s not prison, so I think it’s a win. I think not _one_ of my team fucking _checked up on him_ when he’s clearly not an adult, so none of y’all have any goddamned right to question me right now.”

Dahan dropped her eyes for a moment before bringing her eyes up. “You’re gonna bring the Strike-Commander down on us, and we gotta travel back to Zurich with Singh and Ahmed and their judgemental team staring us down, with that kid next to us.”

“I’ll handle the Strike-Commander,” Gabriel growled. “If everything’s packed up, we’re taking the kid and we’re leaving.”

She stood her ground and he could see her trying another line of attack. “If we take him, how are we better than the gangs and terrorists that use child soldiers? How are we better than the people we put away?”

Gabriel’s temper snapped. “You can’t stand what Blackwatch does, you can’t stand behind me, get the hell out, Dahan,” Gabriel said, lip curling to reveal a wolf-grin that was nothing like a grin should be. “No one in Blackwatch shoulda been kept around. Three goddamned quarters of you should be locked up. You volunteering?”

“Nossir,” she grumbled, walking away.

When she was gone, he turned his head to look at the kid, who was standing at the crack of the door, frozen. “You got something to add, kid?”

The kid licked his lips. “Not a kid.”

“Yeah, you said,” Gabriel sighed.

He always hated having to go to plan B.


End file.
